“Living wisdom” carries this idea of a dynamic, growing, becoming, manifesting sort of project. It’s not just what some wise dudes wrote a long time ago. It’s ongoing, a living project. It, itself, can and will evolve over time, as we slowly, collectively learn. We can be less confused, more wise, more sane … but doing so is always a matter of actually doing so. It must be lived, not just known. And it’s about, centrally about, the art of living this strange human life that we all are. To me, “living wisdom” implies all of this as tersely as possible. There’s no 1 word, so we’ll have to use 2. And “wisdom” provides the best foundation to build on among the options above.
It’s not religion, it’s not science, it’s not New Age spirituality, it’s not philosophy in the modern sense, it’s not atheism, it’s not self-help, it’s not just humanism or the humanities (though, like philosophy, the humanities did start off as very much this project during the Renaissance, but has become something different and more academic in modern times). Once we do the work of clarifying how this project is related to but different from each of these, once people have a sense for what living-wisdom is as a shared human endeavor, having a generic term to hang that understanding on saves us from having to redefine the project from scratch every time.
